Agatha Said, pt. 16
Happy June! Cicada Brood X has emerged and is causing quite a racket in my neighborhood, but I can’t say I mind it. A little white noise is good for my brain. I just finished my most recent manuscript and am now trying to catch up on some reading while ideas of my next project circle around my mind like sharks going for the kill. That’s one reason I chose this month’s quote.
Agatha Said:
“There is always, of course, that terrible three weeks, or a month, which you have to get through when you are trying to get started on a book. There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off. Then you go out, you interrupt someone who is busy — Max usually, because he is so good-natured — and you say: ‘It’s awful, Max, do you know I have quite forgotten how to write — I simply can’t do it any more! I shall never write another book.’
“‘Oh yes, you will,’ Max would say consolingly. He used to say it with some anxiety at first; now his eyes stray back again to his work while he talks soothingly.
“‘But I know I won’t. I can’t think of an idea. I had an idea, but now it seems no good.’
“‘You’ll just have to get through this phase. You’ve had all this before. You said it last year. You said it the year before.’
“‘It’s different this time,’ I say, with positive assurance.
“But it wasn’t different, of course, it was just the same. You forget every time what you felt before when it comes again. Such misery and despair, such inability to do anything that will be in the least creative. And yet it seems that this particular phase of misery has got to be lived through.”
The Context: In this recollection, Agatha has just finished writing a theatrical adaptation of The Hollow. Once it was a success, she felt she really had a handle on the whole writing thing, although every time she had a bit of despair at the beginning of a new project, wondering if maybe this time would be the time she couldn’t do it.
Why I Chose It: Well, it’s majorly relatable. I think most writers know that feeling very well. You finish one project and you’re floating on that high for a while. Then you think, “I’m going to start my next one,” and you have ideas—so many ideas!—but choosing the right one and starting on it can feel like trying to push a semi uphill. And slowly the question creeps in, what if you can’t actually write another one? What if you’ve written all you had in you and you’re all out? Evidently it does’t matter how much you’ve written before (at that point, Agatha had written dozens of books), there’s always a point where a writer wonders if they can actually do it again.
But in the end, Agatha and the rest of us realize this is what we do. There are always ideas and there are always more books/stories/plays in us. We’ll get there, as long as we (and our loved ones) can survive the initial painful month of questioning everything we ever thought we knew. (Speaking of what we think we know, next month I’ll be shifting a bit and sharing what I think happened during Agatha’s mysterious disappearance, based on all the clues laid out in her autobiography. I can’t wait. I have thoughts.)
